Mother still struggles with loss of son

Associated Press

GRAHAM — Tiny white lights on Bonnie Fuller’s Christmas tree are reflected softly by the bronze urn in a corner bookcase. A rosary circles the base of the urn, which holds the ashes of her eldest child and only son, Monte Donaldson.

Snapshots of Donaldson and his fiance, Colleen Whorley, make the corner a quiet memorial to the couple, who died in the crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261. They were headed home from a vacation in Mexico on Jan. 31, 2000, when they died with 86 others aboard the plane.

For months afterward, Fuller, who also has two daughters, wept at any mention of her son, who was just 31 and loved music and travel.

She struggled with the mounds of paperwork spawned by the crash, and examined his waterlogged diary, his backpack — other things he carried on the day he died. She hoped for dreams about her son and his fiance, saw messages from them in heart-shaped rocks and mud puddles.

This year, things have been better.

"It gets better as far as not having the pain when I think of them," Fuller said. "The reality has gotten kinder, more familiar."

She’s emerged from overwhelming grief to work on her comfortable home here — painting walls, retiling a bathroom, reupholstering couches. She tends her two dogs, five horses and seven cats. She cooks.

Fuller, a machinist at Boeing’s Frederickson plant, has escaped the first rounds of layoffs. Her husband, Rick, is back from nearly a year of work in Central Washington.

But this season is difficult.

"I just miss them so much," she said. "I don’t break down as easily or as often, but when I do, it’s hard to recover."

Her two other children — daughters, Tori, living near Yelm and working at a dental office, and Desirae Donaldson of San Francisco — "are doing good," she says.

In June, after a wave of depression, Fuller started seeing her counselor more regularly and began taking antidepressants. Neither seemed to work for her, so she took some time off from work.

"You don’t want someone like that working on airplane tails," she joked.

But she’s emerging from the darkness of loss.

"For the longest time, I felt guilty about even having fun," Fuller mused. "What kind of mother was I? Now I realize I should have fun because Monte died having fun."

So she and the family took a cruise to Alaska. They visited Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. One day on the beach there, Fuller found two larger feathers bracketing a little feather. She thought it might be a message from Monte.

"My husband says I build a message into everything," she said. "But he’s not a mother."